8 minutes of Nurburgring crashes: bet you can't look away

Get ready to cringe.

For a modest fee, any driver can take a lap around the Nurburgring during open sessions. But the lap ticket isn't the only toll. Sometimes the angry gods must be appeased with a sheetmetal sacrifice. Here's this year's supercut of the most embarrassing, cringe-inducing, gut-wrenching crashes of 2014.

There were no serious injuries in these mishaps—just some badly bruised egos and unceremoniously crumpled bodywork. It's a Halloween horror movie for gearheads.

Anyone who sets a tire on the Nurburgring knows what's in the cards. A narrow track with barely any runoff area, crowded by regular folks of widely varying driving abilities, compounded by fickle weather, is going to create a few hairy situations. It takes guts to put yourself in that mix.

Especially if you're driving an early-70s Ford LTD Coupe, which pirouettes through a bend at 1:51 with uncharacteristic grace, then keeps on pirouetting right into a wall. Or an aircooled VW Beetle, looking uncomfortably out of place among all the brand-new BMWs and Porsches. But none of these drivers should feel too bad—even the expert drivers who pilot the Ring Taxi BMWs occasionally overcook it, as seen at 3:27 in the video.

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You'll see some interesting line choices, a few very lucky saves, and the bumper-crushing inevitability of physics. Enjoy.